FYI Solutions Blog

As a Business Analytics service provider, FYI Solutions stays on top of the latest trends regarding Business Analytics. This has included mobile BI and Cloud-based BI. We recently read a very interesting article, “7 Top Business Intelligence Trends For 2013”, written by Cindi Howson of BI Scorecard and published by Information Week. Among the seven was the mainstreaming of in-memory technology. Following is an excerpt from that article:

In-memory technology saw several major releases in 2012, and that makes 2013 an opportune year for companies to implement this technology. In-memory was initially an approach leveraged by a few OLAP systems (like TM1, now part of IBM Cognos) and a few specialty vendors (like QlikTech and Tibco Spotfire).

Now all leading BI platform vendors have in-memory solutions, with Oracle being the last to join the ranks with its Exalytics appliance, which runs the TimesTen in-memory database. Kicking off 2013, SAP announced the ability to run its core transactional (OLTP) applications on the Hana in-memory database. Nonetheless, debate about when to use in-memory or when to use an analytic appliance, columnar database or disk-based data warehouse will continue, driven by constraints including available expertise, analytic demands and cost.

Other noteworthy 2012 in-memory announcements included:

• Microsoft Hekaton, an in-memory transaction support within SQL Server, expected in 2014 or 2015